Google brings Chrome apps to Android, iOS platform

Google today announced that apps designed for its Chrome browser will also be available as native apps on the Android and iOS mobile platforms.

In its announcement, Google said it was offering an early developer preview of a toolchain based on Apache Cordova, which is an open-source mobile development framework. Apache Cordova allows native mobile apps to be built using HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Developers can use the tool to wrap their Chrome app with a native application shell which will allow them to distribute it to Google’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store.

The developers can also use the Chrome Apps Developer Tool to run their app on an Android device without the need to install an IDE ( Integrated Development Environment which provides developers with tools/facilities to develop a software) or the mobile platform’s SDK (Software Development Kit).

Google has also made sure that some of core Chrome’s APIs, which are used by Chrome apps, will run natively on mobile devices well. The APIs include:

• identity:  Allows sign-in for users using OAuth2 without prompting for passwords

• payments (which is currently Android only): Allows developers to sell virtual goods within the mobile app

• pushMessaging: Allows developers to push messages to the app from developer’s server

• notifications (currently Android only): Allows developers to send rich notifications from the mobile app

• storage: Store and retrieve key-value data locally

• syncFileSystem: Which will store and retrieve files backed by Google Drive

• alarms: Allow developers to run tasks periodically